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MIDWEEK MIXTAPE // April 21st 2010

This week, I have been mostly listening to LCD Soundsystem‘s clunkily-named new album, This Is Happening. It’s streaming on their website, and it’s reasonably brilliant.

If you want an in-depth review, with lots of important words, go to Pitchfork, not ANBAD. OK, one more smidgen of info: the LCD album is chock-a-block with songs that vary in style and, in honesty, quality.

Which is quite appropriate, because here, sidling quietly through the side door is the ANBAD Midweek Mixtape, the cheap ‘n’ cheerful virtual new bands C90 Cassette:

FIRST! Mission Controlsent me an email saying that they’d discovered Friends Of ANBAD and all round-good guys Egyptian Hip Hop via this very website. Perhaps they’re saying this to every website, like brazen hussies, but I for one am prepared to believe them, because it massages my fragile and needy ego.

It’s a great remix that takes the best bits of the original, amplifies them and extrudes it all to the point where it appears to be on the verge of falling apart at the seams, but never does. Great.

SECOND!Cocos Lovers are delightful. There, I said it. Comprising a complex web of husband/wife/sister/brother relationships, which must give live gigs an added frisson of excitement when someone plays a duff note, they make delightful folky shambling songs. And they’re yet another band that are happy to admit that they’ve toured with Mumford and Sons. Make of that what you will. Lovely warm songs.

THIRD! Windsor Bellephone can play more instruments than you. I’m confident of that. He lists 12 on his Myspace page, which probably gives Prince a run for his multi-instrumentalist money. I presume he doesn’t play them all at once, unless he’s found a novel way of playing the theremin with his buttocks. While he’s not fitting instruments to parts of his body that shouldn’t have instruments attached, he makes quirky, spooky, shanty-ish pop. Quirky and charming.

FOURTH! Bromheadshave half-inched the Ramones’ haircuts and play songs in libraries. This seems like a reasonable niche market. I bet the sound absorption is good, what with all those books, so perhaps their thumpy, raw and happy songs will sound even better there. Shhhhh!

FINALLY!Vacuum Spasm Babies were always going to make it onto ANBAD because of their frankly ludicrous and brilliant name. Songs like Science Division are crazy and endearingly dizzy – any song that uses “science division/echo delta/extra ninja” as a chorus will get my vote, time after time. Other songs are quite gentle, thoughtful and beautiful. Crazy, curious, clattering.